Thursday, March 17, 2016

Dr. Kami Pothukuchi, Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State University

The
WMU Center for the Humanities sponsored a talk by Dr. Kami Pothukuchi,
associate professor and chair of the Department of Urban Studies and
Planning at Wayne
State University. She spoke to a group of 150 recently about the urban
agriculture movement in Detroit and how ideas about community are created through
the practice of urban agriculture and local food systems.

Pothukuchi
pointed out that big ideas such as food justice, sustainability and sovereignty
matter because they inspire us and inform work on the ground. However, groups
translate these ideas differently within their varied contexts and draw on a
repertoire of strategies familiar to their communities. Thus, community is both
an outcome of and a resource for rebuilding food systems that are better than
today’s industrial system.

Notions
of community are especially challenged in Detroit given its recent history of
abandonment. Population estimates from 2014 count 680,000 and show a dramatic
decline from nearly 2 million during the city’s heyday in the 1950s. The city’s
Land Bank has more than 90,000 properties or roughly 30 percent of the city’s properties
that have come into its ownership due to tax foreclosure. Four out of five the
city’s residents are African-American and 36 percent of the people live in
poverty. Three out of ten households are food insecure, according to definition
used by the US Department of Agriculture. One in three adults is obese and
according to a study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
2009, one of five children and youth ages 9 to 18 are obese. The city
restructured $18 billion of debt as it came out of emergency management in
2014.

It
would seem a hopeless venture even to think of building community in such a seemingly
devastated place and yet since 1997 a groundswell of neighbors and friends has
been steadily coming together to grow gardens on vacant lots near their homes.
In so doing, theyimagine a new future for the city. One by one people have
planted over 1,500 community, school and backyard gardens. Some are even
growing food for the city's 10 community markets in a cooperative that reaped
$80,000 in revenues last year.

As
major grocery stores left the city, gardens are an increasingly important
resource in providing fresh fruits and vegetables even though they don’t
provide all the population’s needs. Over the past couple years, however,
Meijers and Whole Foods opened stores in Detroit. Together with community
markets and farm stands in many neighborhoods, several corner stores have also
added a fruit and vegetable section to their business. Food, in other words, has
become a key ingredient in engendering a new spirit of community in Detroit.

The Detroit Food Policy Council formed in 2009 following the adoption
by Detroit’s City Council of the City of Detroit Food Security Plan and spearheaded
by the Detroit Black Community Food
Security Network,
to address problems related to food access in the city. This networking body
comprises of representatives from the food system, youth and government all
committed to nurturing the development and maintenance of a sustainable,
localized food system so that all residents may be hunger-free, healthy and
benefit economically from the local food system. The values of justice, respect, integrity,
inclusion and transparency guide its work.

Although
some city leaders are ambivalent about urban agriculture, grassroots people
keep moving forward. Part of the problem is a common perception is that
development is the “highest and best use” of urban land. Another obstacle is
the belief that agriculture is antithetical to development and that urban
farmers want to take over all vacant land. In fact, urban agriculture advocates
led by Keep Growing Detroit take pains to emphasize that 5,000
acres—or about one-third of the parcels now in land bank control—are all that are
needed to create a food-sovereign Detroit, as they define it: a city that grows
most of the fruits and vegetables that are consumed by its residents.

“Instead
of this contest of development versus agriculture that has emerged in some
corners, let’s reimagine urban neighborhoods that are better, more vibrant because they have a community garden or
a small farm,” said Pothukuchi. “They offer many benefits such as nutrition,
physical activity, safety, sociability, and even higher property values, and
the gardens can take different forms depending on if the neighborhood is a
dense, tightly woven one or if it has significant amount of vacant land in it.”

Urban
agriculture is providing much more than food, continued Pothukuchi. It is
opening the way for “food justice” where African Americans and ethnic minority
groups are growing healthy, nutritious food for their community and cultivating
leadership in the food system. Such a system offers an alternative vision to
the industrial food system, which fails to treat people of color with respect
and instead extracts resources from their communities.

“The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network—or DBCFSN—calls on fellow
African-American members to take on leadership roles in food system work and
invites white people and others with anti-racist commitments to join as
allies,” said Pothukuchi.

Meanwhile,
farms like D-Town, located on seven acres in Rouge Park, include programs
in youth leadership and education, a farm stand, and cooperative buying. DBCFSN also is developing a grocery co-operative—the People’s Food Co-op. A stalwart presence in its Eastside
neighborhood, Earthworks Urban
Farm—the city’s only certified organic farm—supplies the neighborhood through
its farm stand and through incorporation of meals served by the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. It has a nearly 4,000 sq. ft. passive solar greenhouse
across the street from the Soup Kitchen.

In
addition to her professorial role, Pothukuchi is founding director of SEED Wayne, a campus-community collaborative dedicated to building
sustainable food systems at Wayne State and in Detroit by nurturing student
leadership.

The
students of SEED Wayne plant three gardens on campus and sometimes sell their
harvests at the Wayne State Wednesday Farmers
Market, which is
located on Cass Avenue, WSU’s main drag, from June to October and features
12-14 growers each week. The market generates between $200,000 and $250,000 in
sales each year. It also offers up to $20 of matching Double Up Food Bucks each market day, to shoppers who use their SNAP benefits at the market. And, in
exchange for $5, students get $10 in vouchers to buy fruits and vegetables.
Chefs provide cooking demonstrations and healthy eating ideas, and youth entertainers
provide a welcome break for shoppers and passersby.

SEED
Wayne sponsors outreach programs and partnerships with local institutions to
engage people in various conversations about food, health, nutrition and
community. It even trains students to offer structured nutrition and healthy
eating workshops and healthy food demos.

“SEED
Wayne is shaped and maintained by students,” said Pothukuchi. “It has a flat
hierarchy and word of mouth is its best recruiting tool. People collaborate in
different ways through interdisciplinary opportunities, academic and
non-academic venues, storytelling and more formal data collection. Also, all
participants learn to take time to reflect on what they’re doing as well as to analyze
the outcomes of their work and develop better strategies.”

SEED
Wayne tries to be mindful of what it is doing and at one point even turned down
the opportunity to renew a significant grant because it didn’t match its
mission and purpose. However, mindful also of the need to get off the grant
treadmill, it has established an endowment to support SEED Wayne students into
the future.

SEED
Wayne approaches its activities from a definition of sustainability that
commonly involves integrating the social, economic and environmental sectors.
To this, they have added a fourth, democratic engagement. Thus, the four
essential “Es” guide their work in developing food systems that are:

·Ecologically regenerative

·Economically vibrant

·Socially equitable

·Engaging of community members in a
democratic process

“SEED
Wayne is helping forge connections to the national and the local food
movements,” said Pothukuchi. “It is a contextualization of big ideas about food
that is helping us build a community here on Wayne State’s campus and to enact
a new vision of a food system that helps community to take root.”

“Reimagining
Community” is the theme for this year's Humanities Center speaker series, which
is designed to help people reflect on a global culture of war, social
injustice, environmental calamity and the nation's stark racial and political
divisions, and then to reimagine the idea of community by putting an emphasis
on healthcare, racial and gender equity, feeding the hungry and fostering community.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Say
what you will about Donald Trump and his run for the White House, the man knows
how to use the media effectively—and he's beating it at its own game.

He
comes out with several Tweets each day to add his word on a given topic and
people listen—both his supporters and his critics. He gets himself on the news
nearly every day, too, and this is all free publicity. As a result, people are
excited about this year’s presidential election, and they are responding in
unprecedented numbers at the primaries and caucuses.

How
does he do it? Dr. Sandra Borden, professor of communication, explains Trump's
media savvy with an eye toward history and an ear on what's moving the public.

“Trump
is a natural outcome of several trends in mass media that have been
accumulating over the past 30 years and converged in this moment,” she said.

For
example, the media have increasingly focused on celebrity news. At one time,
shows about the stars and their personalities and lives shown on “Entertainment
Tonight” were not considered journalism. Now, such formats and content have
been embedded into the news model.

“Donald
Trump is a prominent and highly successful and wealthy businessman,” said Borden.
“He also is a reality TV show star. We’re used to the media focusing on
personality, and he knows how to cater to this aspect of the media culture.”

The
2007-08 writer’s strike was instrumental in the increased reliance of TV
networks and cable stations on reality television. Since they needed to fill
air time, they turned to unscripted shows that were cheaper to produce and
proved popular with viewers.

Secondly,
when it comes to presidential elections, the media tend to focus on the horse
race: who’s ahead and by how much. Polling is incorporated into this coverage,
some done by polling groups and some by the TV networks themselves.

“The
logic of this is that the candidate who is ahead deserves more coverage, and
once again, the issues are of less importance,” said Borden.

Dr. Sandra Borden

Campaigns
realize that “messaging” is the most important way to promote their candidates.
They stage “pseudo-events” as part of their strategic positioning of their
candidates, which take place in the form of press conferences and rallies. The
candidates, then, deliver “canned information” and sound bites that repeat
their message over and over again.

“By
not digging into the complexity of the issues, the media plays into these
ploys,” said Borden. “These ‘pseudo-events’ are spectacle and they’re cheap,
easy and predictable ways for the media to cover the candidates.”

In
truth, it costs money to pay journalists to gather news and analyze it in the
24-7 news cycle. Political campaigns are wise to this and play to the media’s
priorities. Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan's deputy chief of staff,first utilized this approach of creating a
candidate's image and side-stepping substance in the 1984 presidential
re-election campaign.

So why
does Trump get more coverage than Hillary Clinton, who is ahead in the
Democratic race?

“Journalism
has certain conventions,” said Borden. “News is not about 'dog bites man'
stories but rather about 'man bites dog' stories. Everyone thinks they know
Hillary Clinton, and it’s difficult for her to break out of that narrative.
However, Bernie Sanders has no pre-existing narrative, so he is news—especially
since he is 74 years old and a self-proclaimed socialist.”

In
truth, important public issues are difficult to cover. They rarely have just
one cause or a simple, “magic“ bullet solution. And to give issues thorough
coverage would have been even more complicated in a such a large Republican
field—17 in all.

“Campaigns
know how the media work, so they give the media what they are looking for to
fit their routines and conventions,” said Borden. “That’s why the debates
became personality contests with prepared speeches and comebacks made for the
media to pick up and repeat.

“Journalists
who strive to be objective often avoid covering issues in favor of covering
events. Events are less ambiguous in content and require less analysis—and
cost.”

Alternative
media cover policy issues, she said, but they are more slanted toward their
political leanings on both the Left and the Right.

“The
audience plays a role in this view of news, too, and the Internet has
influenced people’s attention span as well as their ability to get information
on anything they want. Some of that information is authentic and some of it is
questionable. Being informed takes a lot of effort.”

Young
people don't typically read the news every day, Borden continued. Instead, they
use their Facebook feeds for information. This produces a certain tunnel vision
where they consume only certain stories they and their friends find
interesting.

Meanwhile,
the general public often doesn’t read to the bottom of a story, even a great
story, she said. They don’t compare their sources of information. In this way,
the public ends up complicit in its relationship with the media.

Borden,
whose research includes communication ethics, is very concerned about the
future of our democracy if it lacks good journalism.

“Some
people make the argument that journalism has always been written for a small,
attentive audience,” said Borden. “However, as many people as possible should
be informed citizens and not just the news junkies. If we want to maximize our
democratic participation, everyone has to pay attention to the issues and
policy positions of our candidates.”

However,
Borden does see a ray of hope.

“Sometimes
it takes a dramatic turn of events to make people pay attention,” she said.
“Something like the terrorist attack in Brussels can bring the political
conversation back to substantive policy questions, though terrorism is an issue
that also can turn on emotions.”

Those
who vote will decide the election whether they are up on the candidates’
positions on the issues or not, she said.

“There’s
no secret gathering among the media to corrupt politics,” said Borden.
“Journalists are an idealistic breed who really do care about the political
process. They are political junkies, but that doesn’t come across when they are
pressured to produce stories on the 24-7 news cycle, work on tighter deadlines,
fill up air time and web space. This is not deliberate. It is not a conspiracy.
It is the logical conclusion to all these things that drive the media.”

However,
the media can’t just be about winning, entertainment and ratings either.
Elections should be about ideas, she said.

“The
media, the political campaigns and the citizens all need to do their parts,”
said Borden. “The good news is that, if everyone does his/her part, the job
gets done.”

Many Americans today are scratching their heads over the
popularity of Donald Trump, New York billionaire real estate magnate turned
presidential candidate.

However, his supporters seem to be very clear about his
appeal. Typically, they believe that he says what many people think about
issues like trade, jobs, immigration, torture and multiculturalism that they
have not heard in a long while. Some political analysts also believe Trump’s
bravado appeals to authoritarian types of people. He appears to know what he’s
doing and saying even though he is long on style and short on specifics.

Trump is a largely non-ideological Republican who has
made donations to candidates of both parties. He is motivated less by social
issues than by political pragmatism and economic populism, said Peter
Wielhouwer, associate professor of political science and a specialist in
elections and campaigns.

“What this means is that he can say what he wants—and he
usually does,” said Wielhouwer. “On top of that, he is the master of the sound
bite. He uses short words and then repeats them over and over again. This
appeals to his supporters who are angry and frustrated over business-as-usual obstruction
politics and their own economic disenfranchisement. Most of his supporters are
non-college educated people whose income and personal finances have fallen
behind. This sets up an environment for a candidate like Trump to come in.”

As the heat of the primary season increases, the frenzy
over Trump’s success is likewise steaming up as “establishment” Republicans
fret over where they went wrong, what they should do and how they can defeat
Trump.

Before Super Tuesday, several Republican leaders like
Senators John McCain and Mitch McConnell as well as House Speaker Paul Ryan
denounced Trump. Recently, 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney made some
scathing remarks that Trump was a phony, a fraud, a misogynist and a bully who threatens
America's future.

And
yet, some
GOP leaders are warming up to him, including Paul Ryan after Super Saturday, because they
believe a Trump nomination might help them with donors and supporters for their
own campaigns.

Meanwhile, Trump is definitely attracting people to him in
significant numbers as droves of them—including new voters—show up at his
rallies and more importantly, the state primaries and caucuses. For example, in
both the Iowa
caucuses and New
Hampshire primaries entrance and exit polls showed that pluralities voted
for Trump. It is unclear since then what the first-time voter choices are, but
Trump’s supporters in many states tend to be younger and with less than college
education (though there are some exceptions).

Dr. Peter Wielhouwer

“He evokes emotions and provides simple solutions to
complex problems,” said Wielhouwer. “For example, according to Donald Trump, if
you have an immigration problem, you build a wall. If you have a problem with
Muslims coming into the country, you keep them all out. If you have a health
care problem, you eliminate the boundary lines between the states.”

These easy and simple solutions provide bumper sticker
messages that are not only digestible and memorable, but they ultimately allow
Trump to dominate the media who scurry after him to find out the latest
outrageous thing he has said.

“Trump is a master media manipulator and he knows how to
get attention and coverage. He evokes strong emotions, which attracts media
attention, which ultimately gets people to watch him—even those who don’t
support him. In short, he makes news, which is good for the mass media because
this ultimately attracts TV advertisers.”

“The anger and frustration of Trump’s supporters goes
deeper than not liking President Obama,” said Wielhouwer. “Many of Trump’s
supporters believe in the principles of less government, less cronyism and
restoration of American pride and strength. They are not as concerned about
social inequality as economic inequality. They feel they have been left behind
and that the American Dream is elusive for them and their children. They can't
go to Bernie Sanders, another outside-the-establishment candidate, because he
believes in big government programs,
higher taxes, and more regulations. So they stick with Trump.”

The teflon-coated candidate
even survives criticism for his personal life and the contradictions that go
with it. For example, Trump has been married three times, twice to immigrant
Slavic women. Ivana Zelnickova and Trump married in 1977 and had three children
before they divorced in 1991. Trump married his second wife, Marla Maples, a
runner-up for “Miss Georgia” in 1993, and they had one child before they
divorced in 1999. The current Mrs. Trump is Melania Knauss-Trump who is also of
Slavic background. The couple has one child.

About one-third to one-half of the Republican base is evangelical
Christian, said Wielhouwer. They care about abortion, the sacredness of the
family and tend to oppose expanding gay rights. Like all voters, they care
about economic issues and support Republican positions on national security. In
contrast to national media reports, Wielhouwer suggests that Trump support
among Evangelicals is not that high.

“Consistently across the states, we see that Trump
support in this group is either below or just at the rate seen for Republicans
in general. For example, among Michigan primary
voters, 38% of white born-again or evangelicals voted for Trump, compared
with 37% of Republicans not in this group. But among voters who believe shared
religious beliefs matter for candidate support, Ted Cruz had much higher
support. And this is typical.”

As for Trump’s alleged
racism, he evaded questions about his rejection of David Duke and the Ku Klux
Klan just before Super Tuesday on March 1.

“The white supremacist
element in America is getting smaller,” said Wielhouwer, “so its influence on
national elections has been waning even though this group still manages to get
a lot of media attention. And Trump is clearly tapping into these groups’
support with his nationalistic and anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

Some critics say the Trump phenomenon looks like an
upheaval of GOP establishment politics and may even be sounding the death knell
for the Republican Party itself.

“I would not make sweeping generations of that broad a
scale,” said Wielhouwer, “but the Republican leadership clearly is unsure about
how to deal with the conflict it appears to be having with its base.”

The credibility of our political parties depends on their
predictability, he continued. The Republicans are the party of small
government, for example, but they have helped grow it. The party says it encourages
the small business owner’s success, however, large corporations and rich
business owners appear to have benefitted the most from the party’s policies
and general direction.

“There’s a disconnect between what the GOP says it stands
for and what it does in Congress,” said Wielhouwer. “This creates uncertainty
in the voters, and it’s hard for them to connect to the ‘establishment.’ This
opens the door for Trump.”

This same sort of disarray happened to the Democrats in
the 1980s, and did not shake itself out until Bill Clinton came along as a “new
Democrat” in 1992.

“The party was really fractured in 1988 and in 1992, that
showed itself with a wide range of candidates,” said Wielhouwer. “Clinton emerged
as a non-establishment candidate who didn’t fit the liberal stereotype of the
party. He appealed to the base and to moderates. It will take some time before
Republicans can figure out who they are and what they can do.”

One area that unifies Republican is anger directed at
President Obama.

“Many loathe him, but they also generally oppose Democratic
positions on principle,” said Wielhouwer. “Much of Republican opposition to
Obama is not about racism, though there are some racist subgroups in the party.
Much of the opposition is mainly ideological.”

“In fact, the Republicans have been hating Hillary
Clinton much longer than Barack Obama has been on the political scene, and they
are likely to be highly motivated to vote against her. Hate has long been known
as a strong motivating force in politics.”

Some Democrats are ambivalent about Hillary, too. Her
trustworthiness is at issue even though she is probably the most experienced
and most qualified among all the candidates. For example, in the Michigan Democratic
primary 40% of Democrats said that Hillary Clinton is not honest or
trustworthy.

“Those e-mails make her look terrible,” said Wielhouwer.
“If she is charged with a crime and continues to run under a cloud of
indictment, that could be very bad for her. Democratic Party leaders avoid
talking about this possibility, but it looks like the FBI and the Department of
Justice are not simply letting the issue die. Neither will the GOP.”

Wielhouwer also speculated that even if Clinton is
indicted before the November election, it is unlikely there will be a trial any
time soon.

Third party candidacies have been mentioned, especially
in the context of Republican elite’s opposition to Trump.

“Third parties, however, have virtually no chance of
winning,” said Wielhouwer, “because of the way we are set up constitutionally.
Such a run by a Republican third party candidate would almost certainly split
the party’s vote and guarantee a Democratic presidency. Former New York City
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican, had expressed some interest in running
as a third party candidate, but decided against it in early March for precisely
this reason.”

Last December, Trump insinuated that he might run as a
third party candidate but he continues to deny that possibility, especially now
that he is earning a respectable number of delegates.

On the left, the Green Party candidate for president,
Jill Stein, might be an alternative for some disaffected Democrats, however, a
vote for her also has the potential to “chip away at the edges” of a potential
Democratic win, said Wielhouwer.

If a President Trump is elected, Wielhouwer can’t begin
to predict what his presidency would look like because Trump’s sound bites
don’t provide enough clues about what he would do in office. However,
Wielhouwer is concerned, as are many Americans, that Trump might win.

“According to what Trump has said, it doesn’t appear he
is committed to individuals’ religious freedoms or to rights of political
expression,” he said. “He threatens those who criticize him and has expressed a
willingness to change libel laws, which tend to limit First Amendment expressive
liberties. Neither does he seem to know much about the Constitution. That’s
very concerning about a serious contender for the Oval Office.”

One more final, ironic note. Despite all of the political
haranguing and the people’s disappointment and anger over obstruction and
gridlock, some quiet negotiations have been taking place between President
Obama and House Speaker Paul Ryan with regard to the earned income tax. Maybe
they provide an example of how compromise could work and shine a little light on
how government could solve problems for its electorate.